Biography

Hiroshi Ishii is Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is head of the Tangible Media group associate director of the Lab. Ishii's research focuses upon the design of seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment. His group seeks to change the "painted bits" of GUIs to "tangible bits" by giving physical form to digital information. Their work emphasizes that the development of tangible interfaces requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review.

Ishii and his team have presented "Tangible Bits" at a variety of academic, design, and artistic venues such as ACM SIGCHI and SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, ICC, Centre Pompidou, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A display of many of the group's projects took place at the NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo in 2000, and at Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria from September 2001 to August 2004.

Prior to joining the Media Lab in 1995, Ishii led a CSCW research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories, where he and his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard. He was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto in 1993 and 1994. Ishii received his BE degree in electronic engineering, and ME and PhD degrees in computer engineering, from Hokkaido University, Japan. In 2006 ACM SIGCHI elected Ishii to the CHI Academy, recognizing his substantial contributions to the field of Human-Computer Interactions through the creation of a new genre called "Tangible User Interfaces."